Genderpop

GOETHE INSTITUTE ATHENS PRESENTS GENDERPOP FESTIVAL 4TH TO 6TH APRIL 2008There are these seldom moments in history when subcultural practices, styles and ideas come out of nowhere and change the whole space of a city, a country, a generation. In the best moments these practices are at the same time a joy and a political act. In the realms of gender and sexuality there is no other city like Berlin in Europe, which has transformed sexual identities and performative practices into a playful space of body politics. The new genderpop-scene has understood that gender is a performance and that there is more than a boy and a girl. This scene deconstructs the boring norms of gender roles and invents new ones, plays with them as well as reflects their flaws and errors.The Genderpop Festival gives an impression of this lucid international Berlin scene, bringing together positions from performance art, experimental pop music and contemporary dance. Between the normal border of high and low these artists transform contradictions into a new vision of performative sexuality, that bring a queer and a feminist tradition together as they would be the crazy childs of Simone de Beauvoir and Andy Warhol. Glamorous and sexy, abstract and critical, including artists from Germany and Switzerland, France and Italy, USA and Spain, Genderpop opens the stage for the cutting edge articulations of the experimental Berlin Performance Underground.Being present in important Berlin institutions like Hebbel Theater, Volksbühne or Podewil, as well as in the insider clubs such as Barbie Deinhoff´s or Basso or international festivals of electronic music, performance and dance, artists like Alex Roccoli, Aranxta Martinez, Eszter Salamon, William Wheeler, Alessio Bonacorssi, Rhythm King, Joy Gutthard or Namosh will present a multiplicity of positions between entertainment and experiment, utopia and scepticism in the field of body and gender politics.Topics like drag queens and striptease, dj culture and breast cancer will be touched, to open a space in Athens with three days of high art reflectivity meeting agit prop party, that brings the gender discourse with all its pleasures and ambivalences in the international debate to Athens.Curated by Margarita Tsomou and Tim Stüttgen, produced by Wolfger Pöhlmann with Goethe Insitute Athens.